The student uprising is fighting for all of us

Dear students, 

What an honor it is to stand with you all, and to stand with you not as teacher or writer but shoulder-to-shoulder as comrade and accomplice. What an honor to witness this courage and this clarity, to be just a small part of the life-affirming time you have opened-up in this asphyxiating genocidal present.

Our liberal ruling class is fond of platitudes about being on the “right side of history.” But these always come long after that history has been made and tamed. Let them keep their platitudes. One day they will, no doubt, turn them on this moment too; but today it is you, in the largest student movement for generations, that are making history. Today it is you who teach, today it is you who educate, today it is you who lead. And what you’re teaching and learning and enacting in these spaces is worth a million classrooms.

You know as well as I do that this struggle is long and will remain fiercely contested by the powers that be. They will keep coming for you, first with their overseers of “civility,” those purveyors of “complexity and nuance,” then with their goons and thugs — uniformed and un-uniformed. 

In the dead of night, they will come for you, they will tear gas you, pepper spray you, shoot you with rubber bullets. They will try to silence you, smear you, arrest you, scare you. Worse still, they’ll patronize you, and talk about your misplaced enthusiasm or abused privilege, or how you need to read a bit more history, or how you’ll one day outgrow this naivety; they’ll send out their entire gaggle of authorized stenographers to “advise” you, to “counsel” you on the timbre of your rhetoric or the militancy of your demands (lest you alienate the “community”), or, to “teach” you about the myriad complexities of modern financial investments that couldn’t possibly be divested from things as mundane as genocide or apartheid. But they can never take away what you and your comrades across the globe have already achieved, the future you’re already engendering in joining the struggle for Palestinian liberation.

If Palestine has ignited our planetary consciousness once again, it is your movement that insists on rising to the moment at the very core of the imperial world. It is you who have refused to let genocide become our normal; you who have refused to accept “business-as-usual” in the shadow of the mechanized slaughter of thousands of children. You who have refused complicity in a genocide effectively administered by the world’s most powerful states in the advanced capitalist west, a genocide the liberal democracies of “the free world” fall over themselves to arm, finance, rationalize, and abet. And in doing so, you have refused our collective gaslighting; you remind us that we’re not actually going insane, that this sense of madness is the only human response to this global choreography of carnage, to image after image after image of ashen lifeless children being pulled out of the rubble in the name of “western civilization and values.” 

It is you who remind us that we revolt not because we have a choice, but because we can longer breathe. When Aaron Bushnell, whose act of self-sacrifice in opposition to this genocide remains entirely incomprehensible to our political order, charged that “this is what our ruling class has decided is normal,” he could not have asked for a more worthy response. You have picked up Aaron’s mantle, and you honor it. As you honor the martyrs of Gaza and Palestine in Hind’s Hall, Shireen Abu Akleh Hall, the Lama Jamous Center, and the Refaat Alareer Encampment.

To the cynical weaponization of identity politics and discourses of safety, you have enacted spaces of love and comradeship across difference; the beautiful scenes of Passover celebrations in encampments under a sea of protective Palestinian keffiyehs have on their own shattered the racial-colonial common sense and aesthetic order of Euro-American Zionism. But you have also done this with a clarity that continuously foregrounds the Palestinian struggle and rejects the demonization of Palestinian resistance, including its unequivocal right to a war of national liberation. In doing so you help us rediscover the language, historical literacy, and courage of the Left we still hope to become.

I see in your uprisings the cumulative knowledge that you have cultivated over years of organizing, study, and labor, in meetings and classrooms, on the streets and behind barricades. Your urgency and militancy grow organically from this knowledge. You know that the fight for Palestine, like the fight for Black lives, indigenous sovereignty, socialist futures, and open borders, is a fight for us all. And you also know that the slaughter of Palestinians today is prefiguring the slaughter that awaits millions on a burning planet tomorrow, that the algorithmic killing sprees of AI-powered drones and quadcopters are already making their way across the earth’s surface, that the homicidal sadism of a humiliated Zionism lurks in every frustrated supremacist project. You know that the systems of surveillance, incarceration, and segregation over there are at work in the border regime and carceral state over here. 

In this, you remind us that Palestine condenses our struggles. Palestine is the name of an inassimilable excess that can’t be captured in late capitalism’s regime of signs; it can’t be captured because class power — that self-conscious power of capital’s ability to command and that runs between the boards governing our academic institutions and the corporate-financial world — remains an imperially derived power, still entirely contingent upon war and plunder. And so, we — we the exploited, the looted, the dispossessed, the racialized, the illegalized, the wretched — see ourselves in Palestine. 

In truth I’ve always known it’s your generation that would make this breakthrough. Not just because I didn’t subscribe to the tales of your attention deficits, nor because I have an inflated sense of your abilities. But simply because of the historical challenge you have, for better or worse, inherited. It is you, born in the shadow of the great recession, active shooter drills, and the forever wars, that have come of age in the global disorder of the slow collapse of the unipolar imperial world. In fact, you were born into a temporality of crisis that is uniquely yours: indefinite secular stagnation on the one hand and imminent climatic collapse on the other. 

But it’s not simply that you’ve inherited climate catastrophe, an entirely looted commons, neo-feudal inequality, and all but broken public institutions, but that the way out of these crises looks harder than ever. In some way I believe you’re better for it — for one, your nose for elite-ordained bullshit is all the sharper. But the risks too are grave. Nothing would’ve been easier for those in your generation than a turn to reaction, or dissociation, or to any kind of escapism. Instead before our very eyes, the best of you have decided on revolutionary love. It’s no wonder our ruling class is so dumbfounded. 

That your uprising has emerged on the terrain of the university is no coincidence. It’s the university above all that concentrates the historical contradictions of our age. And like the good dialecticians you all intuitively are, you know that in the contradiction lies the hope. Nothing could be more telling of the current scale of the contradictions and indeed the crisis of the university than the hysterical, brutal militarized response to your protest. 

You’re practicing everything that academic administrators profess to value: collective democracy, civic action, selflessness, empathy, diversity, courage, and risk-taking. Yet when these cease to be a series of empty signs circulating as operations of value at the behest of finance capital, they become a danger. When the university has been entirely financialized then divestment appears like a terminal threat. When the “worth” of the university becomes overwhelmingly an index of financial circuits and flows, of market confidence and “belief,” then of course the pageantry of robes, regalia, bagpipes, and syrupy vapid commencement speeches attains a hollow sacredness of its own. When “the show” is all there is, then of course it must go on even as children—pulled out from the rubble in pieces at a rate of about 95 a day every day for 7 months (how’s that for returns?) — are slaughtered by weapons our universities help finance. 

The truth is that our universities are financialized corporate entities that leak. What we do in them is a kind of leakage that has to be captured and regulated as value. Everything from the training of critical thought to the ethics of critical pedagogy, from radical study to the questioning of given narratives and histories is a leakage that somehow the university-as-private-equity-firm both depends on and dreads, both valorizes and heavily regulates. 

Today it’s precisely these leakages that the rightwing assault on higher education is coming for. They’re coming to plug the gaps. The Congressional witch-hunts are just the latest iteration. They’re plugging the gaps, taking the regulation to its logical conclusion, because the ruling classes know very well the size and magnitude of the crisis that is not imminent but already here. They know they’ve left you with a burning planet, crumbling infrastructures, atrophied democracies, and foreclosed futures. They don’t need people like you who think, who question, who critically parse, and less still, people who are committed to causes like anti-imperialism and genuine universalisms. 

They need technicians, financiers, engineers, and the kind of quiet cold competencies of the managerial paradigm; they need people who are not invested in the world but invested in stocks, or better yet, invested in themselves as figures of a kind of stock, as human financial portfolios. And if they have to gut the university to get it done, if they have to mobilize every piece of institutional and repressive power to do so, then they will. Yesterday it was critical race theory. The day before that, trans rights. Today it’s Palestine and anti-Zionism — the script changes, but the play is the same. 

The fight for Palestine and divestment today, then, is also a fight against the corporatization of the university, against its hyper-exploitation of precarious and contingent labor, against its centralization around technocratic administrations, a fight for its genuine democratization. It’s a fight for and against the university. And if the university is to have any future beyond its corporate capture, it will be you and your allies who forge it.

What an honor it is to step into this breach with you. 

Long live the student uprising, long live Palestine!

This open letter first appeared in Cultural Critique Online.